The Ricky Gervais Show

The Ricky Gervais Show is a comedy radio show in the UK starring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington, later adapted into a podcast and a television series. Despite being named after the more famous Gervais, it mostly revolves around the life and ideas of Pilkington. The show started in August 2001 on Xfm, and aired in weekly periods for months at a time throughout 2002, 2003, 2004, and mid-2005. In November 2005, Guardian Unlimited offered the show as a podcast series of 12 shows. Throughout January and February 2006, the podcast was consistently ranked the number one podcast in the world; it appeared in the 2007 Guinness World Record for the world's most downloaded podcast, having gained an average of 261,670 downloads per episode during its first month. According to the BBC, by September 2006, the podcasts of the series had been downloaded nearly 18 million times. As of March 2011, the podcast has been downloaded over 300 million times. An animated series based on the podcast and adapted for television debuted for HBO in the U.S. and Channel 4 in the U.K. in 2010.